Praise = money?

April 23, 2008

Why are we nice to others? One answer provided by social psychologists is because it pays off. A social psychological theory stated that we do something nice to others for a good reputation or social approval just like we work for salary.

Consistent with this idea, a research team led by Norihiro Sadato, a professor, at the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences, NIPS (SEIRIKEN), and Keise Izuma, a graduate student of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, in Okazaki, Japan, now have neural evidence that perceiving one's good reputation formed by others activates the striatum, the brain's reward system, in a similar manner to monetary reward.

The team reports their findings on April 24 in Neuron (Cell Press).

The research group conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments on 19 people with monetary and social rewards. The acquisition of one's good reputation robustly activated reward-related brain areas, notably the striatum, and these overlapped with the areas activated by monetary rewards. These results strongly suggest that social reward is processed in the striatum like monetary reward.

Considering a pivotal role played by a good reputation in social interactions, this study provides an important first step toward neural explanation for our everyday social behaviors.

Related Stories

In the future it will be possible to donate our personal data to charitable causes. All sorts of data is recorded about us as we go about our daily lives – what we buy, where we go, who we call on the phone and our use ...

In 2017 a new £1 coin will appear in our pockets with a design extremely difficult to forge. In the mid-16th century, Elizabeth I's government came up with a series of measures to deter "divers evil persons" from damaging ...

Fashions in research funding, reward structures in universities and streamlining of scientific agendas undermine traditional academic norms and may result in science bubbles. Research from the University of Copenhagen, which ...

The year ahead will feature new and increasingly sophisticated means to capture and exploit user data, as well as escalating battles over the control of online information that threatens to compromise content and erode public ...

Recommended for you

A biomedical breakthrough published today in the journal Nature reveals never-before-seen details of the human body's cellular switchboard that regulates sensory and hormonal responses. The work is based on an X-ray laser ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brains ability to think about the past, present, and future as ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how to wirelessly transmit neural signals to a speech synthesizer. The "thought-to-speech" process ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Most people can easily tell the difference between reality and fantasy. We know that characters in novels and movies are fictitious, and we also understand that historical figures - even if we’ve never ...

(PhysOrg.com) -- Humans don’t always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply ...

1 comment

Everything has a price, but it doesn't have to be in dollars. If it gives a warm fuzzy feeling, basically it's as good as gold, right? While this is already recognized in organizational studies, no one's been able to figure out the exchange rate of money to intrinsic reward.

For one thing, you can't measure warm fuzzy feelings.

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.